Many years ago I published this article abt digging for ancient audio ephemera in Buenos Aires. Reader N. Dinapoli Farina uncovered some related materials and has shared them with us here. I believe that the magazine may have been called “Radio Chassis Television” and the scans below are all from the late 1950s. Click on the images for hi-res. Enjoy!

Here’s an odd lil curiosity for ya: in 1988, SONY made a tiny discman sized to play the ill-fated 3″ CD singles that had recently come on the market. The D-88 could also play regular sized discs, albeit with some… protrusion.

Sansui’s late-70’s line of hi-fi equipment is fairly collectible; I’ve had several of them over the years, and they generally sell for good money. My last pair, a tuner and integrated amp, actually went to a prop stylist for a film… I wish I could remember the name of the picture. Anyhow, aside from the usual amps, preamps, tuners, and integrated amps, Sansui also made this very unusual device during the ‘first-wave’ of home-music-production: The AX-7 ‘Audio Mixer.’ A four-input HI-Z mixer, the AX-7 was designed to allow the user more easily use multiple stereo tape decks to ping-pong tracks into a layered production. It also offered global spring reverb!

We’ve featured a ton of late-70’s Technics materials here at PS dot com, but I think this is the first of their period speakers we’ve described… and wow these things are unusual. The woofer and midrange use rigid flat diaphragms, and the tweeter is a “Leaf” design; check the download for deets on that. Anyone ever listen to these? Thoughts?

How y’all doing. Sitting here on the (what feels like) first day of fall, listening to a pile of weirdo 70’s UK punk LPs: The 999, Steve Harley, The Stranglers, and The Doctors Of Madness. What better match than some musty old paper describing some oddball British speakers of the era: Jordan Watts. This is the first of what will be many uploads of late-70s speaker ephemera, both HiFi and pro-audio. I have 100s of pieces of this stuff to go thru, and finally a free minute to do it. So get ready… and remember to check if Orange County Speakers has re-edge kits available for any foam-edged 35 year-old-speaker yr thinking of buying. Anyhow, download a complete late-1970s JORDAN WATTS hi-fi speaker catalog:

On offer: the Jordan Watts models Juno, Juliet, Jumbo, GT, Jodrell, Jupiter, TLS, Jericho, Centurion, Qubique, and Flagon.The Jordan-Watts speakers used a very unusual 4″ metal-coned driver unit that came in its own integral mini-enclosure. Even stranger tho are their Arabesque and Romanesque “Qubiqe” and “Flagon” models:

There was also an SH-9020 meter unit and an SE-9060 power amp, but I can’t seem to find those documents at present. Soon enough, i’m sure. So anyhow, the idea here was apparently to ‘separate the basic (receiver) into five components.’ Their words. Anyway, the EQ is pretty insane, it’s got way more control than any sane person would ever want. Here’s the whole kit+kaboodle for ya:

OK honestly, i’d prolly wanna buy anything that was photographed in this manner. PREVIOUSLY ON PS DOT COM: the original period adverts for some of these same items. Aye yi yi. Click here for that…